Jain Temple, Sulthan Bathery

An old Jain basadi in Wayanad later used as a garrison by Tipu Sultan’s forces, which is where the town’s name — Sultan’s garrison — comes from.

Jain presence in Wayanad is older than the standing temple: the community here is traced to the twelfth century, with a larger wave of Jain traders arriving in the sixteenth to manage the region’s cash crops, and the granite basadi built in the thirteenth century, in a style carrying clear Vijayanagara influence, on a raised platform with carved pillars supporting a stone-slab roof.

Its later history is what gave the town its name: during Tipu Sultan’s eighteenth-century campaigns through Kerala, his Mysorean forces used the temple’s solid granite walls as an artillery store — a "battery" in the English of the day — and the settlement that grew around it was called Sultan’s Battery in consequence, rendered in Malayalam as Sulthan Bathery. The temple is now protected by the Archaeological Survey of India as a monument of national importance, and remains one of very few Jain structures surviving anywhere in Kerala.

Written for Jain Times. Corrections are welcome — see sources and licences.